Your Music Should Never Stop Playing: An Update from Quality

Everything we do at Sonos is grounded in one thing – to create the ultimate experience with music in your home. Occasionally we fall short and you deserve an explanation.

We have conducted a thorough investigation to ensure we improve in the future. Here is what we’ve found:

December 25: This outage was due to an unprecedented number of connections coming into the Sonos servers that manage our Spotify interface. Although we tripled our capacity prior to the holiday period, we failed to adequately simulate the increased load in our testing. We are developing improved load-testing to avoid this in the future.

December 26: As we worked on addressing the December 25 outage, we inadvertently removed a critical filter that manages the caching mechanism for the Spotify music service. We are developing improved tools to simplify and automate configuration changes to prevent this in the future

December 27: Sonos identified playback and browse failure when using Spotify playlists on Sonos. We removed servers that had a small subset of customers stuck in this state and are continuing to investigate other possible causes.

December 31: Spotify experienced an increased load on their Search servers and our system design wasn’t able to absorb the peak usage without causing delays to our customers. We’ve updated that code to address the issue going forward.

Spotify is a great partner and one of the most loved services on Sonos. We fully believe your music should never stop playing and you should always be able to count on us both for that.